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“You seem less angry about it than I thought you’d be.”

“Sometimes these things happen,” she said, and then surprised me with a bit of gallows humor I would have expected to leap out of my own mouth. “I did not feel it.”

“Ha!”

Now she knelt again, laying her cheek against Dalgatha’s hard, black beak. I stood off and let her take a moment to honor her kith. As I would learn, it wasn’t the first time she had to look at one of her corvids dead, and it was a weight on her. She was far less happy about that bird’s death than her own. When at length she stood, she took a feather from the great beast’s chest and closed it in her own dead hand.

I gestured at the cloud-ship, said, “We have to burn this thing.”

“It is beautiful.”

“You saw it land, didn’t you? It’s why you came back to the cave.”

She nodded.

“Others may be coming, then.” I thought of my own lifeless body and didn’t like the thought of strangers poking about on me, but there’s a strange thing to worry about. On the contrary, we’d want those bodies found, wouldn’t we? Is there a better way out of being hunted than being dead?

But then I thought on the cloud-ship itself, with all its gears and levers and rigging. Such a cleverly made thing it was, a wonder and a threat all in one.

I said, “We can’t let anyone find this wreck lest they figure out how to make such a ship. The Horde would get them, too. The city we were taken to and enslaved, they had knowledge. Too much, maybe.”

“Someone made slaves of us? Giants?”

“Half-giants. Not as big as the bigguns from Hrava, but smarter and more wicked. And much more dangerous. There’s a lot to tell, and I’ll tell it.”

And there it was, I thought—the difference between us, and between her and the Tiger’s Sister. I had not grown closer to this Galva snowed in for months in the Thralls, and she had not been enslaved on the other side of the world. The manacle and the chain change you. If you live or die, dung or eat, sleep or wake at another’s pleasure, you never again hold your own freedom lightly. Like air or eyesight, liberty is not a thing you think about until it’s gone. Other Galva understood that. Even though I had my friend back, there really had been a death. Death always brings a closing of doors and a putting away of things.

My gaze wandered across the deck of the fallen ship, found an iron loop for holding chains.

“No. This ship musn’t be found.”

“All right,” she said, perhaps convinced by the look in my eye. “We burn it.”

Huh. Maybe I’d played her part in my head poorly when I argued with her about the thunderdust. Maybe she would have agreed to destroy it. She was a better person than I was, after all. Was it only me I’d been arguing with? But I wasn’t going to mention thunderdust all the same.

Not an hour later, with the cloud-ship burning itself down to black bones as we’d made it do with yak oil and flint, we were laced into our snowshoes, layered up with furs and wool, and walking side by side through the snowy Thralls, each of us carrying a heavy pack and a stick for walking.

We took turns dragging the sled.

And what was on the sled, you ask?

Only the nastiest book west of Molrova, bound in the dog-man’s chain mail hauberk and bitten in place by the bear trap. Wrapped in a bearskin. Too fucking much to carry, with our packs of proper supplies besides. While the ground was flattish, we each had a rope tied to the backs of our belts and pulled it together.

This trek was going to be forty kinds of cold, white hell.

But at least my neck was warm.

I was wearing Bully Boy like a stole, as I had when I bore him into these mountains several months that felt like years before. He was alert to every cold breeze, bobbing his wee head and sniffing.

Behind us, the smoke of the burned airship rose. It may indeed be found, but I doubted anyone who didn’t know about sathium would be able to figure out what that ship did from the little that would be left of it. It was a shame to think of something once so beautiful so reduced; I half wished a late-spring snow would cover it, as I had covered my own dead face with a cloth. Not that I truly wished a blizzard on us; it was going to be hard enough to get back through the fifth or so of the Thralls we had managed to cross. Had we really thought we could get over so many mountains so late in the year? What a pair of eejits we were, and how lucky to be alive.

And also, how lucky to be dead, for dead we might better remain alive.

Closer behind us, in the cave, we’d arranged the assassins, dead Kinch and dead Galva, so their bodies told the story of a fearsome fight and a heroic last stand wherein all perished. It had felt strange to loot my own body of the ring of Catfall, and my armor and weapons, pattens and boots. Galva of course still had her shield and bullnutter, and the pouch of precious bits and letters and memories that she kept slung about her.

“I feel pretty good for a dead man,” I said.

“I wish you looked better.”